In his latest live streamed AMA, Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson declared that Midnight—the smart-contract side-chain he has long touted as the network’s privacy and compliance pillar—will ignite what he called “the single biggest economic event in the history of Cardano” and that the decisive launch sequence will culminate by November.
Cardano Biggest Economic Event
“Cardano is going to get the largest distribution of any chain, even though it’s a smaller market-cap than Ethereum, Solana, and Bitcoin,” Hoskinson said, adding that Midnight’s token-generation event (TGE) and foundation rollout are “turning on this month and next month,” with a coordinated media campaign of videos, infographics and a formal tokenomics paper to follow. “If Midnight is successful, it’s the single biggest economic event in the history of Cardano,” he stressed.
Hoskinson framed Midnight as the linchpin of a “triumvirate” that welds Cardano, Bitcoin and the data-protection chain into a single settlement stack. Using Taproot-enabled recursive proofs on Bitcoin for long-term finality—and an operator-based batching layer dubbed Fairgate for near-instant execution—Midnight will allow enterprises ranging from fintech giants to custodians such as BlackRock “to decide whether they want 100% Bitcoin-derived security or faster, cheaper throughput,” he said.
To handle high-frequency retail flows, Input Output is folding Hydra and Lightning research into Thundercloud, a hybrid layer-two that Hoskinson believes will “shake the DeFi world” once it’s bundled with Blockfrost’s indexing and a forthcoming Hydra-Lightning amalgam proposed by developer Adam Dean. The full Fairgate–Thundercloud stack, he claimed, will be production-ready in time for the November milestone.
Hoskinson’s enthusiasm for Midnight contrasted sharply with his growing frustration over Cardano’s governance gridlock. The ecosystem, he reminded viewers, now owns a 1.7 billion ADA treasury yet lacks an executive arm able to deploy it. “We could convert a hundred million dollars’ worth of ADA into USDM tomorrow,” he said, insisting that seeding liquidity across Cardano’s DeFi markets would earn yield for the treasury while solving the network’s perennial stablecoin shortage. “But people keep asking ‘save us, save us’ while stalling 39 budget votes.”
That bottleneck, he argued, is the direct result of a 2022 pivot toward fully decentralized legislation and judiciary functions without restoring any counterpart executive layer. “I’m not working for $200 an hour,” he snapped, warning that Input Output (IO) will increasingly focus on “building on Cardano” rather than subsidising core infrastructure unless incentives change.
The AMA also laid bare Hoskinson’s personal fatigue. “I’m tired—been on a ten-year death-march,” he confessed, revealing plans for a six-month sabbatical once Midnight is safely live and the 2026 budget overhaul begins. Nonetheless, he affirmed that IO will keep delivering imminent upgrades: Ouroboros Leios, Babel fees, Lace mobile, StarStream virtual machine integration, and node-diversity initiatives aimed at sharding mempools.
Why November matters
Although Hoskinson teased that internal testing could push certain Midnight components live earlier than November, he framed that month as the point at which the foundation, TGE and ecosystem incentives align in public view. By then, the Midnight Foundation will have announced “over a hundred” launch partners—Brave Software being the latest named—and the capacity-token dual-model will begin routing privacy-preserving transactions back to Cardano’s Layer 1.
If the rollout succeeds, Hoskinson predicts not just a surge of users and fees but a re-rating of Cardano’s strategic value in sovereign-grade finance and regulated DeFi. “Cardano plus Midnight together plus Bitcoin—we solve all those problems,” he said.
Previously, Hoskinsons already revealed that the “Glacier Drop” will be a massive airdrop. It will distribute Midnight tokens (NIGHT and DUST) to approximately 37 million wallets across eight major blockchains (Bitcoin, Ethereum, Cardano, Ripple, Solana, Binance Smart Chain, Avalanche, and Polygon).
At press time, ADA traded at $0.66.
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